Buggy Software
After flattening my machine a couple of times, and trying over 6 months, I finally got MSN Desktop Search to work on my machine. This was necessary because one of my installs (maybe WinFX beta) broke LookOut, and I absolutely can’t live without full-text search of my e-mail.
So now Outlook is almost unusable. I get random errors about “.OST inaccessible”, and when that happens all free/busy is lost and I can’t work with calendar anymore.
When I tried looking in the help documents, I was amused to find that the only link under “help” menu in MSN Desktop Search points to an item “Is this copy of Windows legal?”. Yes, I bet there are thousands of people out there who get stuck and wonder “Is my copy of Windows legal?”. It is so wonderful that the option is right there on the help menu. Anyway, it turns out that you have to click the question mark icon to get help.
Still no luck there, though. I had to do a Google search to find the relevant page on MSN. There I find the “cause” of my tribulations (emphasis mine):
If you are using Outlook 2003, and have more than 1GB of RAM available on your machine, you may encounter problems with Outlook. This is a known issue in Outlook, and a fix for this will be available shortly from the Outlook team.
To avoid this problem, you can remove memory so that your computer has 1GB of less of RAM, or you can disable memory above 1GB.
OK, so fast fulltext indexing is really RAM intensive, and I need 2GB of RAM in my machine, but the software won’t work with more than 1GB? Didn’t we all have to make our code work on more than 1GB back when 32-bit OS was introduced? This is 10 years later. This seems like a ship-stopper bug to me. At a minimum, the software should have told me this on install, so I wouldn’t waste so much time.
Update: There is a post-SP hotfix available for this bug. Thanks Sriram for pointing it out!